by Jay Feldman
The machinery was in place. The stage was set for the inevitable.
It arrived just before 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese air force unleashed a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu. Upon receiving the news, Roosevelt immediately issued the already-written Presidential Proclamation 2525, regarding Japanese alien enemies, which laid out the “conduct” and “regulations” that Japanese aliens were to follow. Their movements were restricted to certain areas, and the list of items they were forbidden to possess included firearms, ammunition, bombs, shortwave radios, transmitters, signal devices, and cameras. Most important, “alien enemies deemed dangerous to the public peace or safety of the United States by the Attorney General or the Secretary of War” were subject to “summary apprehension,” and arrested aliens were subject to “confinement.”38
The FBI swung into action, making warrantless arrests of Japanese, German, and Italian aliens, even though the presidential proclamations regarding Germans and Italians would not be issued until the following day, December 8, and the United States would not officially be at war with Germany and Italy until December 11. As Francis Biddle, who was now attorney general, would later write in his memoir, “On that Sunday night Hoover was authorized to pick up several hundred without warrants, and this procedure was followed for a short time until the more dangerous had been apprehended.”39
On December 8, Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamations 2526 and 2527, dealing with German and Italian aliens, respectively. The same day, Hoover sent a telegram to the SACs canceling the earlier categories denoted in the ABC list:
Immediately take into custody all German and Italian aliens previously classified in groups A, B, and C, in material previously transmitted to you. In addition, you are authorized to immediately arrest any German or Italian aliens, not previously classified in the above categories. In the event you possess information indicating the arrest of such individuals necessary for the internal security of this country. Above procedure applies only to German and Italian aliens, and not to citizens.40
Despite Hoover’s instruction that citizens were not to be arrested, a number were. “We were jittery,” the Alien Enemy Control Unit chief, Edward Ennis, later admitted. “We did not know what to expect … Our policy was to act first and explain afterward.”41 By December 10, three days after Pearl Harbor, nearly 2,300 individuals had been taken into custody, including 1,291 Japanese, 857 Germans, and 147 Italians.42 On December 17, Hoover officially widened the net to include U.S. citizens.
Those arrested in the days and weeks following Pearl Harbor included community leaders, Buddhist priests, owners of businesses that catered to ethnic interests and tastes, martial arts masters, newspaper editors and publishers, ordinary workers, and thousands of other utterly harmless individuals. Peter Greis, a chemist who had been living and working in Milwaukee since 1923, was taken from his home at 3:00 a.m. on December 10, and his family had no word of him for six weeks. George Teikichi Kojima, a bookstore owner in Oahu, Hawaii, was arrested in the middle of his wife’s funeral at the Nichiren Shu Buddhist Temple on December 7, after which his fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary Mariko, parentless and penniless, wound up living at the temple for the next eight months. The San Jose salesman Filippo Molinari, taken into custody on the wintry night of December 11, was not permitted even to take his overcoat or to remove his house slippers and put on his shoes. Describing the period immediately following December 7, Jerre Mangione, a special assistant to the INS, wrote, “Civil liberties took a back seat in those days; in the name of national defense expediency became the order of the day.”43
Certainly, there were genuine subversives nabbed in the roundups. The Chicago Bund leader Dr. Otto Willumeit and his fellow Bund officer Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze were arrested for providing U.S. defense secrets to Germany and Japan. In Southern California, the U.S. Navy lieutenant commander Kenneth D. Ringle worked with the FBI for forty-eight consecutive hours to round up 450 bona fide Japanese intelligence agents, whose names had been garnered by Ringle when he carried out an audacious nighttime break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles the previous spring.‖
Other detainees, while having engaged in no seditious activity, harbored undeniable nationalistic feelings for their homelands and may have been capable of carrying out espionage work in time. But the vast majority of those taken into custody were guilty of nothing more than their ethnicities.
By March 20, 1942, when the head of the Alien Enemy Control Unit, Edward Ennis, testified before a House subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, there were approximately sixty-seven hundred alien enemies in custody. “We thought we were off to a pretty good run,” Assistant Attorney General James Rowe Jr. would later recall.44
Following arrest, the case of each detained individual came before an Alien Enemy Hearing Board, composed of prominent citizens, one of whom was usually a lawyer. In setting up these panels, Ennis, who had a reputation as a civil libertarian,a was supposedly carrying out Biddle’s express belief that “everyone in our country, whatever his racial or national origin, should be treated with fairness. We did not want people pushed around.”45
Nevertheless, at alien enemy board hearings, the deck was heavily stacked in the state’s favor. The local U.S. attorney’s office represented the government, and the evidence presented had been gathered by the FBI in the course of its investigation of the detainee. For the majority of detainees, who understandably had no idea why they were in custody, this was the first time they were informed of the reason for their detention. The detainee could present his own evidence but had no right to object to questions put to him, and was allowed representation by a friend or relative but not by a lawyer—“an exclusion,” according to Biddle, “that greatly expedited action, saved time, and put the procedure on a prompt and common-sense basis.”46 As Rowe later noted, “It went much better, much faster without lawyers.”47
Many hearings were simply kangaroo courts. Ennis acknowledged as much to the House subcommittee when he said, “Every effort has been made to get away from costly time consuming judicial procedures … If there is substantial reason to sustain the charges against the alien, every doubt at this time must be resolved against him and in favor of the Government. The man cannot be given anything like a jury trial on these issues.” He further admitted the antidemocratic nature of the custodial detention program as it was being carried out. “The underlying principle of the whole program is that it is preventive,” he testified. “I think we are bound to intern some people on suspicion in order to resolve all doubts in favor of safety. In some instances there will be injustice done. A man may be interned because of his associations, while he himself would do nothing at all against the country.”48
The hearing board could recommend one of three courses—unconditional release, parole with conditions, or permanent internment—and after review by the Department of Justice, the final outcome was determined by the attorney general. The criteria applied by the hearing boards and in the review process, however, were decidedly inconsistent and frequently baffling.
One detainee who was a former German army officer, for example, had been a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany in 1936–37 and had distributed propaganda brochures in the United States that sang Hitler’s praises. At the time of his arrest, he was a Bund member, the secretary of Friends of New Germany, and an employee of the German consulate in Cleveland. This man received the board’s recommendation for outright release, but the attorney general decided instead upon parole. Another German alien, who had written letters in which he called Hitler “beloved Fuehrer” and expressed his joy that after the war Germany would rule the world, was deemed “potentially dangerous to the security of the United States” and recommended for internment by the hearing board, but the review section of the Department of Justice recommended “parole under fairly strict sponsorship.” The attorney general paroled the man.49
Carmel
o Ilacqua, on the other hand, had come to this country in 1924 after serving in the Italian navy, as an ally of the United States, during World War I. For more than ten years before Pearl Harbor, he worked as a clerk at the Italian embassy in San Francisco, where he was required to keep his Italian citizenship and join the Fascist Party as two conditions of employment. As a veteran of World War I, Ilacqua was also a member of the Federation of Italian War Veterans, known as the Ex Combattenti, a social organization that functioned as a support network for its members. When the U.S. government ordered the closing of the Italian consulate in June 1941, Ilacqua chose to stay in this country with his wife—a naturalized U.S. citizen—and their six-year-old daughter. Despite no shred of evidence that he had ever engaged in any activity that could be even remotely classified as subversive, Ilacqua was arrested on December 17 and, for the next year and nine months, was moved from one internment camp to another before being released.
Similarly, Taichi Fujimoto, a carpenter and farmer from the Wakayama Prefecture of Japan, had been in the United States since 1927. He settled in Wapato, a thriving Japanese-American farming community in Washington’s Yakima valley. By the late 1930s, the Japanese ethnic community around Wapato had grown to about a thousand people, and a new, ambitious community center was planned. With his expertise in carpentry, Fujimoto was put in charge of construction and the training of volunteers. His work on the center made him a community leader but also a marked man. He was arrested on January 19 and, with no indication on his part of disloyalty to the United States, interned at Fort Missoula, Montana.
Fujimoto was finally paroled nearly a year later, on December 29, 1942, but it was not to freedom, and his reunion with his family was not in the Yakima valley. By that time, Fujimoto’s wife, Ayako, and their five children, along with the entire Japanese and Japanese-American populations of the West Coast—approximately 112,000 people, almost 70 percent of whom were U.S. citizens—had been “relocated” to ten inland concentration camps, in what the historian A. Russell Buchanan has aptly called “the most widespread disregard of personal rights in the nation’s history since the abolition of slavery.”50
*In addition to these advances, the Editorial Card Index—which by the time of Stone’s reform order contained more than half a million entries—still existed, and while Stone’s edict made the index unusable, it lay dormant, waiting, as the former attorney general Palmer had put it, “for future use at the hands of the Government” (see Chapter 6 n. 13, above).
†The Secret Service of the Treasury Department had agents working in every Communist group, but their function was limited to discovering potential assassination plots aimed at Roosevelt.
‡As noted, Hoover had enjoyed a secret arrangement with MID since the early 1920s.
§In fact, there was never a serious fifth-column threat in the United States during World War II; the few acts of sabotage and espionage that were carried out were isolated incidents bearing no connection to a centralized plan. One of the more sensational cases occurred in February 1938, when the FBI broke up a German spy ring in New York City. Despite the ineptitude of the German agents involved and the government’s reassurances that no vital national secrets had been compromised, the media attention accompanying the case served to inflame fifth-column fears.
‖The raid resulted in the June 1941 arrest and deportation of two Japanese spymasters and the neutralizing of the West Coast Japanese spy network, which, as documents secured in the break-in clearly showed, was dedicated to intelligence gathering rather than to acts of sabotage or a fifth-column strategy.
aEnnis would later serve as president and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
CHAPTER 10
A Jap Is a Jap
The forced relocation and incarceration of 112,000 ethnic Japanese under the auspices of the War Relocation Authority is generally regarded as having sprung independently and full-blown in direct reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On the contrary, the WRA program was part of a larger, more encompassing process—a natural and direct outgrowth of the groundwork that had been laid with its antecedent, the Alien Enemy Control Program. This is clearly spelled out in the government’s official 1943 publication Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942. “The ultimate decision to evacuate all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast under Federal supervision,” states the report, “was not made coincidentally with the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States. It was predicated upon a series of intermediate decisions, each of which formed a part of the progressive development of the final decision. At certain stages of this development, various semi-official views were advanced proposing action less embracing than that which finally followed.”1
The process began at least five years before Pearl Harbor, with concerns over national security, and was originally aimed at Communists, Fascists, and Nazis. By December 1939, it had evolved into hysteria directed at German, Italian, and Japanese aliens, as J. Edgar Hoover began compiling the notorious ABC list. After Pearl Harbor, the idea of rounding up all the Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast gained incremental acceptance.
Moreover, the commonly accepted understanding of the relocation and internment as having been based exclusively on racism—a constantly perpetuated interpretation—is one of the most serious misunderstandings of World War II domestic history. While racism was clearly and undeniably a key motivating factor, it is not the entire explanation. A fuller picture emerges only when the ethnic Japanese situation is seen in the total context of the internment of the three alien enemy groups. A cloud of suspicion hung over all three communities, based in large part on the assumption and fear that aliens’ loyalties were necessarily divided between the United States and their countries of origin, and therefore their allegiance to this country was questionable, regardless of how long they had lived here.
Identifying racism as the sole cause of the Japanese and Japanese-American relocation and incarceration distorts the historical record and obscures the other, equally critical factors that were responsible for not only the Nikkei internment but the internment of German and Italian enemy aliens as well. Those factors were rooted in national security fears and hysteria, and in the long-standing history of nativism in this country.
Suspicion and surveillance of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans had been building for decades. As early as 1920, when the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division was responsible for monitoring the Nikkei community in the United States, the BI conducted extensive investigations of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans throughout the West, South, and Southwest—not for having committed any illegal activity but merely for being of Japanese descent. In Seattle, for example, a study was made of all Japanese landowners, while a similar investigation in San Antonio concluded that “an organized effort is being made by Japanese to obtain agricultural lands in the Rio Grande territory for the purpose of colonizing them with Japanese from California.”2 In New Orleans, an investigation was made of all Japanese who bought cameras, and in Galveston, Texas, every Japanese resident’s name was indexed. In California, where the Japanese community was largest, the BI investigated Japanese-language schools, Japanese-owned businesses, and Japanese fishermen, who were assumed to be spies. One California BI agent deduced that the Japanese would become “a real menace to the American people unless this Government makes strict legislation governing them.” In fact, California had already attempted to do exactly that, passing the Alien Land Act of 1913, which forbade the immigrant issei generation—who were already barred from citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790—to own land, and a second law seven years later that prevented all Asian immigrants from even holding long-term leases.*
In hearings before the Senate Committee on Immigration in March 1924, witness after witness spoke in denigrating terms of the ethnic Japanese.†
The Sacramento businessman V. S. McClatchy complained, “They have driven
white labor off the farms,” and, “They have displaced the whites in business.”3 California’s attorney general, U. S. Webb, called the Japanese “an unassimilable people,” telling the committee, “They are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. They speak a different language; they worship another God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait.”4
After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan chilled. By the following year, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division, the State Department, the Commerce Department, and the Justice Department were all involved in secret, cooperative surveillance of the ethnic Japanese population.
In 1934, suspecting that in the event of war, the Japanese and Japanese-American community would harbor a fifth-column threat, President Roosevelt had the State Department look into the potential of Japanese espionage and sabotage on the West Coast. The investigation concluded that “when war breaks out, the entire Japanese population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.”5
At the same time, Hawaii, with its large ethnic Japanese population, came under scrutiny. Japanese-Hawaiians had long been regarded as a latent threat, with the assumption being that they would back a Japanese invasion of the islands. In the early 1920s, the Army’s War Plans Division developed a strategy for defending Oahu. The plan was produced by the division’s assistant chief of staff, the then colonel John L. DeWitt, who two decades later, as the commanding general of the Fourth Army and Western Defense Command, would be one of the architects of the Japanese relocation and internment. DeWitt’s plan for Oahu called for the imposition of martial law, suspension of habeas corpus, and registration and selective internment of Japanese aliens. In 1933, the Hawaiian branch of MID produced a fifteen-volume report that portrayed the Japanese-Hawaiians as disloyal, fanatical, duplicitous, arrogant, morally inferior, and highly likely to support Japan—including committing acts of sabotage—if an invasion occurred. In 1936, DeWitt’s original defense plan was amended to incorporate intelligence activities, including broad-based surveillance of the Japanese-Hawaiian population.